On marriage, betrayal, independence and forgiveness

A Thousand Pardons is a sharp-edged yet surprisingly funny  view of mid-life crisis, complacency in marriage, teen-age angst, and the dramatic turns these can taken when least expected.

A privileged family in suburban upstate New York suddenly discovers serious fault lines in their lives when Helen realizes that the man she married so many years ago no longer exists. Oh, Ben drives to his law practice every day, sleeps in her bed, and eats her food, but interaction with her or their adopted teenaged daughter Sara is virtually non-existent, and couples’ therapy proves a sad joke.

But it isn’t until Ben gets a fixation on a young sexy summer intern and gets caught with her in a hotel room in a scene worthy of Monty Python that everything implodes. Ben gets fired from his job, arrested and ultimately sent to jail, and Helen and Sara abandon their fancy home and judgmental friends, and flee to Manhattan, a tiny apartment and a job search.

And here’s where the self-discovery, each character in their own way, begins. But this is also where the story loses its realism and veers into the Hollywood realm of silly but feel-good. Suburban housewife Helen takes the business world by storm when she successfully applies the mantra of “ask for forgiveness and ye shall receive” to hard-boiled corporate characters in need of a quick public-relations makeover. Her successes get noticed, she climbs the corporate ladder and gets her confidence back. Meanwhile, Ben gets released from jail and, attempting his own form of sacrifice and rehabilitation, seeks to build a relationship with his angry surly spoiled–did I say she is teenaged?–daughter.

Helen and Ben are living in separate worlds, with a furious Sara caught between them, when Helen acts on an adolescent impulse and gets dragged into a crazy adventure around a teenage crush of her own that yanks her family back into the same world again, with forgiveness–if not reconciliation–visible on the horizon.

As far-fetched as Helen and Ben’s story is at first glance, Dee brings home to his readers the common threads of modern life that afflict all of us at times and so there is some resonance to be found. I found the first part of the book much more affecting than the last, but a fun read for all that.